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Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger

Monday, March 23, 2009

I'm a Dapper Dan man

Well, that's definitely overstating the case - I'm no whizz with Dapper, and not exactly the spit of Ulysses Everett McGill. However I am becoming rather a fan, somewhat belatedly (I think I first heard about it from Mike Ellis some time ago). Anyway, before my SKOS experiments I hade my first proper play with Dapper to give an API to the great geophys survey data that English Heritage have made available. One nice thing was that the results aren't paginated (I just twigged how lucky that was), so without much trouble (given I was learning the tool) I came up with a quick dapp for the search. You can search the DB via this dapp using any of the parameters on the original form, though I only built four into the dapp, which you see on the test box - the reason being I wanted to search geographically to integrate the XML that's returned with some MOLA site data. But that only gives the barest info, and I wanted the details too really, so I made another dapp for the details, which takes the ID, and hooked them together for seach results with details. Very gratifying!

Next step is KML for this lot, but I will talk to the content owners before doing anything like that, which might put a load on their servers were I to layer their content onto our maps. One helpful thing, though, is that their app takes a parameter for the size of square to return results for, which means you could write a map application that would only query for the area you're showing at the time.

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